Tag: Didaktik

I am ‘teaching’ on a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Eduction. As part of this the participants (academic colleagues from within my own institution) are required to maintain a reflective learning journal. I have decided to maintain my own learning journal and, unlike the participants, I make this open to all on the course. It sits somewhere between modelling how to ‘do’ reflective writing for professional learning and being honest about the fact that I do not have all the answers ( I am not a master explicator).

I share my second entry here as it pick sup on earlier comments I have made on troubled reading.

WHAT DO I ALREADY KNOW ABOUT TEACHING LARGE GROUPS?

In coming to organising this particular session I am very conscious that I do not have much experience of large group teaching. Almost all of my teaching has been on post-graduate courses and consequently involved small cohorts. What I do have, and share with many of the students on this particular course, is my experience of being a student and experiencing the ubiquitous ‘lecture’. It is important to outline the context of my higher education because the experience of any educational event is largely determined by the particularities of the course, student demographic, location, etc.

I entered higher education in my mid-20s and so came in as a ‘mature’ student. I had no intention of going to university. I had not enjoyed school and only went back to study A Levels (senior cycle in the Irish system) because the bottom had just fallen out of the economy in the part of England I lived. Literally, the industrial landscape disappeared with the large smelting plants and metal works being erased from the skyline. The air quality improved but we were left with few jobs. So, I went back to school but with no plan as to what this might lead to. I didn’t complete my studies and left as soon as I found work. For a number of years I moved from one undemanding job to another, traveled a little, and ended up, by accident, on a community project. This altered my perception of what was possible to BE in life, brought me into the company of people who had been to university, and who encouraged me to consider this option for myself. The withdrawal of funding, during another economic slump, in the 1980s offered me the opportunity to go to college. My choice was to train to be a teacher (I am still trying to work out how I came to that decision). I felt I ‘should’ do something more vocational, and this was a better option than one or two others at the time.

So ‘lectures’ were part of the repertoire of learning experiences, but not the main one. Lectures do not rise up in my memory as important learning experiences. They were mostly boring. An example will illustrate my recollection of the lecture during my undergraduate studies. Being and education degree we had a lot of lectures on psychology. The main lecturer turned up on time. He used acetates (this was pre-powerpoint and widespread use of computer technology), and he provided us with handouts. But, the handouts were usually faded because they had been printed off years before and had been stacked up on his windowsill – hence the fading from the sun. The handouts simply repeated his lectures. My response was to strategically miss his lectures and read the books instead. I spent a lot of time in the library. But maybe this is in part the response of a mature student. The research and anecdotal evidence suggests that mature students are often keen but also strategic in their approach to learning. This particular lecturer relied upon delivery of information but with little space for reflection or engagement. This contrasted with the science lecturers (I eventually opted for arts as my specialty). They had a clearly articulated view of what they were doing. They saw school science as being about students behaving like scientists, engaging in activities were ‘science like’, to think like scientists. And so this was the view they took with us as well. I only had these folks in the first two years because we specialised in our third year, but they had a big impact on me. Their lectures were interactive, they got us to think not just about the process of teaching (the how) but also the ‘why’ and therefore the ‘what’. Sure, there was a good deal of information transfer, but my overriding impression is not of that.

When I came to take on lectures while working as a researcher I was ill-equipped. I had spent years working in community settings where ‘lecturing’ would see you heading straight for the exit door. I had taken in a view that any worthwhile learning came through ‘working with’ people. But how was I to do that when I did the occasional lecture to 200-300 undergraduates. I was often called in to do set piece lectures on ‘gender and education’ or ‘social class and education’ or ‘race and education’. These were stand alone, not even sitting within a wider programme that focused on these topics. Nobody advised me. I was given a timetable and that was it. But, maybe because of the community-based work and because of the need to ‘engage’ people who were unsure about why they were taking part in our activities, I had an intuitive understanding that I needed to capture the audiences attention. So, I used a lot of visual material. Computer-based presentation software was by now becoming common. So I used that. But I also used a lot of video. This meant video tape – so the process of identifying which segments to use was time consuming compared to now and the technical aspect was often beyond the scope of any individual teacher and required a lot of assistance from technicians.

Intuitively I also found myself using a lot of questions. But my skill at this was limited, and so often failed to encourage discussion (let alone obvious reflection). I think what I did take from my community-based work was that you had to be clear about what the key issues were you needed to build your activity around. This should frame the content and form of the activity.

The truth is that I made it up as I went along and with hardly any feedback.

However, these formative experiences did feed into further reflection when teaching became much more a fundamental part of my work in higher education. But I would say that I still have a tendency to try and cover too much ‘content’ without enough thought about matching the pace of a teaching session to the deep structure or deep learning I want to encourage. There is a sense in which I feel that unless I ‘give’ students a lot of ‘content’ then somehow I have failed them.

In selecting the core materials for this session I relied upon discussions within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). So, the articles approach the issue of large group teaching is mostly framed by constructivist assumptions. This doesn’t mean that lectures are rejected. Phil Race’s chapter, for instance, approaches it in a pragmatic fashion, providing really useful tips for structuring lectures. But, as with the three articles, there is a general perspective that lectures are ill-suited for cultivating deep learning. And it is this primary concern with ‘learning’, and specifically learning understood in cognitive terms, which points to the underpinning constructivist philosophy. Constructivism, as I pointed out in Session 1, also underpins much of academic development as a field of practice. And so, this assumption fed through into the selection of videos as supplementary material.

Analytical reflection

The constructivist presumption is that we can organize ‘learning’ experiences in such a way that we can lead students towards deep learning. But can we, and should academic developers, make that suggestion (no matter how subtle) at all? I am unsure. I have been enmeshed in the constructivist presumption for so long that it is difficult to imagine stepping outside of that.

The main challenge for me at the moment is my engagement with discussions of Bildung/Didaktik and the work of Gert Biesta.

There is a lot of similarity between the constructivist approach and that of Bildung/Didktik. Two recent texts I have read (‘Restrained Teaching: the common core of Didaktik’ by Stefan Hopman & ‘Microlearning and (Micro)Didaktik (On Microlearning)’ by Norm Friesen). Both stress the importance of the ‘learner’ and ‘learning’ and not just ‘teaching’; that learning is best understood as an active engagement with content; and sometimes a radical critique of content led ideas of curriculum. But didaktik is concerned mostly with teaching and the teacher, rather than the learner. Hopman’s article challenges some of my presumptions about leading students towards deep learning. He argues that in the didaktik approach teaching and learning are viewed as autonomous of each other, and the content of teaching does not ‘lead’ towards any particular outcome. From this perspective, my selection of particular content (core materials) does not necessarily carry the meaning I might wish students to adopt/learn. The meaning of any educational interaction will be determined by the relationship between particular students, with particular teachers, with particular content, and particular environments. One example is that a student from a Quaker tradition will engage with the study of war with a particular perspective separate from that of the teacher’s intention. Following this, I have to make (the almost obvious) assumption that students on this course will construct their own meaning within the didaktik triangle (student-teacher-content). But more than this, the idea of bildung provides a much broader conception of the purpose of education than that often captured in concepts of ‘curriculum’ or ‘instruction’ or ‘teaching’. Bildung, in its reduced sense, is about the cultivation of the whole person and introduces into teaching/learning the idea that teaching should be aimed at assisting the student to engage with learning in a way that enables them to enter the world. I think I will come back to this in future entries.

Gert Biesta approaches the issue of education very much with bildung/didaktik as his cultural background. In a series of texts he has argued against the dominance in Anglo-American educational discussion of ‘learning’, and so challenges many of the presumptions of the kind of constructivism that has animated my own practice (and many of the ideas students will meet in this course). He argues for the reclaiming of the importance of ‘teaching’. But what he means by this is contrary to the idea of teaching as ‘control’ or primarily about the delivery of content. His argument for the reclamation of teaching (as different from learning) is that in his conception of education the role of the teacher is to bring something new to the didaktik triangle. Also, similar to bildung, he stresses that real education is full of ‘risk’ in that what happens in education escapes our attempts to control it. Now this potentially challenges some of the ideas that will be dealt with in Semester 2, particularly that of ‘learning outcomes’.

Like this:

I have a number of thoughts that still need thinking through and had hoped to write a few posts to do this while taking a break from work. However, it is the nature of my reading over the past week that forms the basis of this entry.

Basically, the stuff I have been reading has disturbed me.

No, I haven’t been sat in the corner of the sofa reading Stephen King. Instead, I have been reading some books on Action Research.

Action Research? And how is that disturbing?

Of course, as a topic it isn’t disturbing at all, though I have had some interesting discussions with colleagues recently about the difficulty of getting action research projects through institutional ethics committees.

It isn’t the topic itself that has proven disturbing, more the reflection on how I see myself as an academic that has proven disruptive and uncomfortable at times. And it is the reading that has prompted this reflection.

The ‘culprits’ have been ‘Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization‘ by David Coghlan and Teresa Brannick and ‘The Action Research Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty‘ by Kathryn Herr and Gary Anderson. Having completed my first semester in the new job I wanted to spend some time reflecting on how things had gone, think about how I might want to develop the role, and catch up on weak areas of knowledge. Given that much of the teaching and learning philosophy of the programmes we run involve active learning, and given that our ‘students’ are academics involved in various forms of developmental reflection on their professional practice (that is insider researchers) there were two fields I wanted to become more familiar with – action learning and action research.

My reading began with Action Research because I am supervising students who are conducting forms of insider research, though not specifically adopting action research methodologies. So, there is a pragmatic element to this reading.

But, there is a synergy between the reading, my current reflections, and taking this job in the first place. And this is where my current sense of disturbance arises.

Over the past few years I have had occasion to reflect on my role as an academic, indeed to re-think what being an ‘academic’ means to me. This has induced a dispositional shift away from what Jacque Rancière would call the ‘master explicator’. We all know the ‘master explicator’, and indeed have been such a person, perhaps often. The ‘master explicator’ is comfortable in their command of the knowledge they expound, and usually engage in ‘delivering’ this knowledge. It implies a process of ‘transmission’ from one who knows to one who does not. I am not arguing against transmission in all instances. I am simply directing attention towards a mode of being an educator and the social relationships it carries. It directs attention towards a particular configuration of power and knowledge.

At the level of disposition I have been moving away from this mode. My own practice as an educator has increasingly been defined by the centrality of ‘learning’ more than ‘teaching’, and of ‘active learning’ as a preferred mode. I have written here about one such example of this approach and how it can be disruptive of assumed social relations. This dispositional shift made me open to the job I now have. Also, the dispositional shift is conducive to a positive engagement with action learning and action research. So, why is it disturbing?

While there has been a dispositional shift this has not, I have found, been accompanied by a cognitive shift.

The sense of myself as an academic has been more bound up in certain knowledge and knowledge communities than I realised. I was very comfortable inhabiting the role of ‘critical scholar’ where that critical stance was conducted through the mode of ‘master explicator’. Rancière makes this point in his own critique of the critical theory tradition. This tradition, which for me was framed by my alignment with the work of Bourdieu and Foucault, enables the critical scholar to take on a special role in relation to wider society. As a ‘critical’ scholar I can see the world in a way that others cannot. And it is my role to reveal the true nature of power. I do not deride this function of critique. But I am perhaps much more aware of the desire inherent in this role, of the ‘honorable’ role it places on the scholar – we can see what others can’t; and our role is to help them see more clearly. But, I asked myself, apart from speaking from such a lofty position, what does this clarity of vision lead me to DO?

I know that I my explication has had positive effects on students. I know that I have influenced students to generate new knowledge in their professional fields that have drawn on this tradition of critique, that enables them to act in terms of raising disturbing questions. And this questioning may lead to change. I do not reject this. I do not reject the role this tradition can play. But I am aware that the ‘change’ that it can effect is often personal, and if institutional is usually small and incremental.

And yet, the ‘small’ and ‘incremental’ change offered by most practitioners of Action Research (an Action Learning) was something I often looked down upon as inadequate in face of the inequities of the world.

Sober reflection on my actual effect on the world due to my role as educator has led me to be more humble in my ambitions. And my recent reading has made much clearer to me the dissonance between my often lofty claims for my theory heavy approach to education and my desire for education to matter, to effect change in the professional practice of my students.

I still feel that some of what I am reading lacks philosophical content. The challenge for me is not to jettison the critical theory tradition, but rather to expand my intellectual and practical repertoire so as to induce a more creative dynamic between my cognitive and dispositional orientations.

There is much to be unpicked here. For instance there are the obvious connections between some strands of Action Research and critical theory, in particular the influence of Habermas on many action researchers, and obviously the role of Paulo Freire in the development of Participatory Action Research. Perhaps, more troubling for my sense of cognitive self is the pragmatist orientation of much Action Research, and perhaps the way aspects challenge my previous dependence on propositional knowledge and deductive reasoning.